1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates generally to analyzing and disaggregating a historical utility consumption data to generate an itemized utility consumption profile by attributing utility consumption to seasonal utility consumption or non-seasonal utility consumption.
2. Description of the Related Art
With the growing awareness of global warming, climate change, and rising energy costs, consumers and industry increasingly demand greater efficiency in utility consumption. Recently, efforts have been made to activate the residential sector in improving utility consumption efficiency, as the residential sector accounts for 37% of annual electric sales and 21% of natural gas sales. Thus, improving residential utility consumption efficiency may affect energy consumption in a geographic region and lead to monetary savings for the consumers.
However, the residential sector has long been considered the hardest to reach for catalyzing consumption efficiency savings. Some of the barriers to consumer adoption as identified in “Market Failures and Barriers for Clean Energy Policies” by Marilyn Brown, appearing in Energy Policy (29) published in 2001, include lack of information, lack of connection to specific opportunities in the dwelling, and lack of clarity about benefits.
To overcome the barriers, it would be desirable to provide a novel method to decompose utility consumption of a dwelling with sufficient resolution in order to obtain an understanding of the utility consumption of the dwelling. Using these disaggregated data, improvements in efficiency can be suggested, evaluated, implemented, and monitored. Specifically, it would be desirable for a novel method to generate a dwelling-specific utility consumption profile based on historical utility consumption information; since by using historical utility consumption information, it would provide a realistic and personalized context to the utility consumption. Additionally, it would be desirable to attribute utility consumption to actual consumption sources in the dwelling, which would provide high-resolution utility information to the consumer and would enable the consumer to see utility consumption in context, and create awareness of efficient utility consumption. At least some of these objectives will be met by the inventions described below.